“It’s funny,” he said, “to think I only saw you yesterday, and that we got married this morning.  Seems as if you’d been here for years and years.  Does it seem awful strange to you, honey?”

“No,” said Annie.  “No, it doesn’t.  It is queer, but all the way here, and when I come into the house, I had a sense of having been here before sometime; kind of as if it was my home all along and I hadn’t known about it.”

“So it was—­and if I hadn’t ever met you I’d been an old bach all my life.”

“Yes, you would.”

“Yes, I wouldn’t.”

They were both laughing now.  He got up and stretched himself.

“Well, Mrs. Dean,” he said, “I gotta go out and fix my disker, and you gotta come along.  I don’t want to let you out of my sight.  You might fly off somewhere, and I’d never find you again.”

“Don’t you worry about that.  You couldn’t lose me if you tried.”

They went through the kitchen, and there a tall gaunt old coloured man rose and bowed respectfully.  He and Aunt Dolcey were having their own dinner at the kitchen table.

“This here’s Unc’ Zenas,” said Wesley.  “He’s Aunt Dolcey’s husband, and helps me on the place.”

And again Annie saw, this time in the old man’s eyes, the flicker of sympathy and apprehension that she had marked in Aunt Dolcey’s.

“And right glad to welcome y’, Missy,” said Unc’ Zenas.  “We didn’ ‘spect Marse Wes to bring home a wife whenas he lef’, but that ain’ no sign that it ain’ a mighty fine thing.”

They went out into the mellow spring day.  Wesley Dean, now in his blue overalls and working shirt, became a king in his own domain, a part of the fair primitiveness about them.  It was as if he had sprung from this dark fertile soil, was made of its elements, at one with it.  Here he belonged, and the very spring of the earth beneath his feet was repeated in the measured beating of his blood.  The land could not warp or break him, as it does so many, for he belonged to it as essentially and as completely as it belonged to him.  Dimly the little town girl beside him felt this, and dimly she hoped that she, too, might prove to be of the same mould.

“Look at the barn, and the stables, and the corncrib,” he was saying.  “See how they’re all built?  Hand-hewn logs chinked with plaster.  Great-granddad built them all, helped by his two slaves.  That’s all the slaves he had, just two and one of ’em was Unc’ Zenas’s grandfather.  Everything’s strong and sound as the day he finished it.”

“That one looks newer,” said Annie, pointing.

Wesley looked a little shamefaced, as does every typical Anglo-Saxon discovered in sentiment.

“I built that,” he confessed.  “It’s a chicken house.  Somehow I didn’t want to go down to the sawmill and get planks and build with ’em ’mongst all these old log things.  So I got the logs out in the woods and build same as great-granddad.  Maybe it was foolish, but I couldn’t help it.”